TWENTY-THREE years in the making, Ellen Kuras’ documentary “The Betrayal” is a powerful account of how the American dream became a nightmare for one Laotian family.

Creatively filmed – Kuras is best known as the cinematographer for indie films such as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” – the doc revolves around Thavisouk Phrasavath, who was a child in Laos during the Vietnam war.

His father worked for the CIA, which was using Laos as a base for an illegal and secret air war in Southeast Asia.

(You can almost see President Tricky Dick Nixon’s nose growing in old newsreels as he denies the US was up to no good in Laos.)

When the US retreated from Laos, the father was imprisoned by the Communist government that took control of the war-ravaged country.

That left Thavisouk’s mother and her 10 children to survive on their own.

Most of the family made its way to Brooklyn in the 1980s.

Since her husband had worked for the CIA, Thavisouk’s mom believed that “the US government will take care of us when we go to America.” How wrong she was.

The family was deposited in a Brooklyn tenement, next to a crack den, where she and her children lived in fear – not of the Communist rulers in Laos but of Asian street gangs.

Their father, long believed dead, showed up one day, expressing regret for helping the CIA.

“I collaborated with the Americans to bomb my own country to save it,” he laments before abandoning his family for his second wife and their two children.

In the press notes, Kuras says she “didn’t want to make a traditional documentary. I wanted to make a film that merged ideas from both documentaries and dramatic film and from experimental film, like the ones I used to watch at the Collective for Living Cinema in [downtown] New York.”

Mission accomplished.

vam@nypost.com

THE BETRAYAL Welcome to America. In Laotian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 96 minutes. Not rated (wartime images). At the IFC Center, Sixth Avenue and Third Street.